


denouement

by vatonages



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Gen Work, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:40:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24596902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vatonages/pseuds/vatonages
Summary: When Gideon goes home, he puts a picture of Spencer in his Victim Book. Gideon titles this “The Loss”.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 58





	denouement

**Author's Note:**

> “You remember too much,  
> my mother said to me recently.  
> Why hold onto all that? And I said,  
> Where can I put it down?”
> 
> ― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

Spencer’s hands are covered in blood. Gideon can tell his ears are ringing, that his heart is pumping so loud he can barely hear, because he’s wiping his hands with a rag like he’s on autopilot, and none of the blood is coming off. 

Blood is wet for only a short time once air hits it. It’s in its nature to clot when exposed to prevent bleeding out, but it also means the blood on Spencer’s hands has gone tacky and dry, and he’ll need to scrub for the better part of half an hour to get it off. Longer if he wants to make sure it’s out of his nail beds and fingernails. Gideon knows Spencer will see the blood for a very long time, even after it’s gone.

“He didn’t want me to save him,” Spencer says. He makes that series of confused, perplexed facial expressions, like he’s trying to turn his emotions into an algorithm, digitize them, like he doesn’t want to understand them with his heart, but wants to comprehend them with his mind. Gideon doesn’t have the heart to tell him it won’t work, that it’ll never work.

“It’s good that you did. You did good work,” he says. “Saved a kid’s life. Now he gets to decide who he becomes.” There’s a silence between them. It should be impossible. There are sirens and people talking and Garcia crying into Morgan’s chest. 

It’s an end of tragedy scene Gideon sees far more often than he’d like to, and he’s titled it “The Aftermath”. The Aftermath doesn’t mean that things turned out good or bad. It only means that it’s over, and sometimes that’s all they can ask for.

“What if I’m wrong? What if he’s right and- and he  _ does  _ turn out to be a killer? What if people die because of me?”

“They wouldn’t die because of you,” Gideon says. “Not unless you’re murdering them yourself. And if he gets out, well, you catch him.” He says it all like it’s very obvious. Spencer still looks troubled, always so troubled. 

Gideon had hoped he could save him but he thinks every day he just hurts him more and more. There’s no way to keep anyone safe, no way to keep them whole. They’re always telling people the job isn’t for everyone but the truth is that it isn’t for anyone. 

No human is meant to see this much death and mutilation. They’re simply not built for it. And yet, Gideon thinks, his stomach turning, it’s been the only consistent thing throughout all of history: People killing one another. 

Maybe people survive the cases but they don’t live. The victims they manage to save, the victims’ families, his team. They’re all losing so much more than they could ever gain. Gideon doesn’t have to be a mathematician like Spencer to realize that it never evens out. They’re always losing pieces of themselves in the end.

Gideon has titled this “The Deficit”. 

He puts an arm around Spencer and squeezes the back of his neck to get his attention. Distraction. His mind is so active that it’s like being in a cage. He gets locked in his brain and has to sit there and be tortured by all the knowledge it has. He doesn’t even get the small mercy of being able to delude himself into fantasy. 

“See that constellation right there?” Gideon points at the sky. Spencer squints. 

“Ursa major?”

“Sure. What’s the story with that one?” Gideon asks, as they enter the nearest building. They need a sink for Spencer to wash his hands in. Spencer’s mouth becomes a flurry of consonants and vowels. He’s listening to none of the words Spencer says as he stands there and watches red water go down the drain but Spencer is used to his long silences and Gideon’s ears are still picking up the sounds. 

“What’s that book, uh,  _ The Alchemist _ about?” he says, just as Spencer finishes up the Ursa major explanation.  _ This is the best he can do. It’s the best he can do.  _ He thinks this to himself Spencer dries his hands, as he gets in the car, as he drives Spencer to the parking lot, as Spencer walks into his apartment complex and Gideon knows that Spencer can’t run from his thoughts forever, but he can help him try. 

Knowledge is power, but sometimes he thinks having so much of it makes Spencer feel helpless.

  
  
  


* * *

Gideon is in his office late. It’s midnight and he got carried away again, that one track mind of his. Rossi used to say he was lucky he was such a damn good profiler because his social skills were never gonna get him anywhere.

_ You take one look at the crime scene and start ignoring the crap out of everyone. I’ve had PDs almost rescind their invitation to work on the case because of you, you know that?  _

He’s finally walking out, pulling on his jacket, when he sees Spencer on his desk, leaning forward. His eyes stare out as nothingness but Gideon knows he must be doing sudoku in his head, mapping out a chess game. 

“Reid,” he says, and Spencer looks up. He does that little smile he does when he’s trying to reassure someone he’s okay. It’s not convincing at all, but Gideon supposes it must work pretty well on non-profilers, though he has to admit he’s pretended to fall for it a few times. 

_ (Haley always says women are natural profilers. She says it’s  _ men  _ who have to work at it, learn how to do it.  _ Hotch says that, and then they laugh together.  _ Haley would get along well with my mother,  _ Gideon jokes, and then there’s silence on the jet. Suddenly, only silence.)

Sometimes he just needs to get away. He can’t always help Spencer because he can barely help himself, and he hates the look on the kid’s face when he can’t give him a reassuring answer to his questions. Nothing about any of this is reassuring, and Spencer’s heart is so big that it’s only a matter of time until it gets crushed.

(Later, when he sees the tourniquet on the table in the shed, he knows it’s finally happened.)

“Are you okay?” Spencer shrugs at the question.

“It’s just...They always want to see. Why do they always want to see? Nothing good can come from it.”

“See what?”

“The bodies,” he says, sounding deeply troubled. “We tell them their daughter died and they want to  _ see her.  _ It’s like they think if they stare at the horrible thing long enough, it’ll stop being horrible. Or maybe it’ll just go away altogether! But it’s not true. Why can’t they see that that’s not true?” Gideon grimaces. 

It had been a bad case. There’s murder and then there’s mutilation. Debby Barnes had been mutilated, cut up worse than Gideon had ever seen. 

(Gideon would never admit to having a favorite COD for the victims they see, but execution style shots to the head where they didn’t even have a chance to feel the pain before they died were some of the best. Better yet, overdosing them on pain medicine so they passed away peacefully in their sleep. There’s no sweeter song than the ME saying  _ She didn’t suffer much, if at all. _

It’s the prolonged torture that really, really gets to him. It’s the way the ME had said the cuts on Debby were made antemortem, and her toxicology screen was negative for anything, meaning poor Debby had to feel every single- His stomach turned. He excused himself to make a phone call, but really it was to throw up pasta carbonara in the bathroom.)

“Some things, people have to learn for themselves. We hope they never have to learn those things like we do, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.”

“I just wish they’d take our word for it. We try to tell them,” Spencer says weakly. And they do. They use coded language like “You don’t want to remember her that way,” or “I don’t think that’s a good idea”. Sometimes the parents realize and they give up, let it go. Other times they barrel past the people holding them back and end up with their head in their hands, crying so hard Gideon is scared they’ll give themselves a heart attack.

“Unfortunately, that’s all we  _ can  _ do. Try to tell them and hope they make the right decision. You really need to get home, Spencer. You look sick,” he says. Sick is a euphemism. Sick is Gideon trying to say that he knows what’s going on, and it can’t go on anymore. Sick is Gideon saying that Reid is far too skinny, far too pale, far too bruised underneath his eyes. 

“I don’t sleep much,” Spencer says. He doesn’t look afraid of being found out. He looks pitiful. There’s a hint of defiance in his gaze that asks Gideon to call him out.  _ Go on, use the words. The real words. Call me what I am.  _ Gideon ignores it.

“None of us do,” Gideon sighs. “But I need you to try. If not for you, then for all the victims that are still out there. The ones the parents are going to ask to see.” Spencer nods at that, swallows hard. 

When Gideon goes home, he puts a picture of Spencer in his Victim Book. Gideon titles this “The Loss”.

  
  
  


* * *

Gideon isn’t a good father. He wants to impart so many things onto people to enrich their lives, but he just can’t take the weight of it in the end. He has to take responsibility for that. Spencer didn’t come to him. He went to Spencer, and he took him with him. He doesn’t forget that he left Stephen behind a long time ago. 

As Ethan plays jazz music with his eyes nearly shut, Spencer says “This is all I was groomed for,” He doesn’t have to say by who. 

(Gideon is the one who makes them waive all the requirements and break all the rules. They doubt him. He says  _ Watch the kid work one case with me as a trial run and then see if you feel the same way. If you do, I toss him back into the Academy.  _

Spencer is the one who cracks the case open and figures out where the victims are held.

He joins the BAU two days later, and even that delay is just time for the proper paperwork to get approved. The Bureau can be swayed on a few things but paperwork remains the unchanging constant.

He makes Hotch introduce him as Dr. Reid and when Hotch pulls him aside, says  _ But Reid is an agent, too. Does it really matter how I address him?  _ Gideon grins.  _ Agents are very often young, but doctors very seldom are.  _ Hotch smiles.  _ So this is about you wanting to be a show off.  _ Gideon puts a hand on his shoulder, eyes sparkling, and leaves it at that.)   


The jazz music would normally soothe his soul, and Spencer’s friend is a musical virtuoso. Gideon doesn’t close his eyes and let the music float over him like he normally would, just keeps his stare fixed straight ahead. 

“How did you find me?” Spencer asks. He looks so thin and young. One time, Spencer had complained about looking so unimposing, so...harmless. Hotch had said it was a good thing, that everyone grew up knowing someone like him and it made them feel endeared.

_ (“I don’t want people to feel  _ endeared,” he said. “ _ I want them to be reasonably intimidated.” _

_ “Intimidation isn’t the only angle, kid,” Morgan said. “Sometimes we need someone who people feel a sense of trust with. You’re that kid everybody knew growing up. A type of person.They know you, or they feel like they do, at least. Sometimes that’s what it takes.”) _

“You’re not that hard to profile,” Gideon says, and god, is that a lie if he’s ever told one. Profiling also says a kid of Spencer’s age, combat skill level, and build would not survive a two day period of torture, high doses of intravenous narcotics, dehydration, and starvation, only to end up killing his 30 year old attacker himself with the single bullet left in a gun he got a hold of solely by sheer good luck.

Gideon can hear Elle and Hotch say together in his mind:  _ Don’t tell her she’s lucky.  _

Even more surprising that he gets the shot right through Hankel’s heart after all that fuss about not requalifying for his firearm carrying privileges. 

Sometimes, the profile is wrong. 

They talk, and it’s cryptic like it always is. Gideon tells himself they never use the words “drug use” or “heroin” or “dilaudid” because if he admits he knows, he has to do something about it. But Gideon has never been a proponent for following the rules. Hell, he broke every single one of them to get Spencer here. Spencer knows that just as well as he does. He just has too much decency to say anything about it.

Really, he doesn’t say them because he’s a coward, and it’s the living victims he never really knows how to save.

  
  
  


* * *

He writes Spencer a letter, knows that pretty soon it’ll be Spencer in this chair, Spencer reading this letter. He’ll finish reading it in seconds, but then he’ll reread it to really absorb it, this time at a slightly slower speed. Then, he’ll feel a sense of disbelief until he notices the badge and gun on the table, which make it jarringly real. He will feel like a thief when he lifts them off the table and leaves the cabin with them. Having them in his old car will feel like he has a passenger with him. He will never recover from the loss.

Sarah dying. No. Being  _ butchered, and mutilated, destroyed-  _ No. Sarah dying. That was a big part of why he needed to go but it wasn’t all of it. He felt a part of himself begging for escape ever since he put Spencer’s face in the victim book. It’s not Gideon who put Spencer in that shed with Tobias and broke all the little bones in his foot. It’s not Gideon who hit him over the head and brought him there.

But it is Gideon who leaves him there. Spencer got himself out. Maybe he came home with them, but Gideon saw all the time that he was still there, that he never really left.

Gideon titles this “The Abandonment”.

Gideon knows that Spencer knows, well, pretty much everything, but it’s the conversation he can’t help overhearing on the way home from the case in Mount Vernon that breaks his heart. 

(“Now, I know,” Spencer whispers to Morgan. “I know what they were thinking and feeling like  _ right  _ before,” Gideon sees the boy whose knowledge has saved so many lives, and realizes that now it’s killing him, and he doesn’t look any older, just sadder. Just impossibly sadder.)

Hyperventilating as he writes, thinking of Spencer in his apartment all by himself injecting himself with some suspicious clear liquid he bought off the street from someone twice his size who doesn’t care about whether he lives or ODs, Gideon knows he has to go away. 

He has to run far, far away because Spencer might be alive and maybe he never died but he  _ haunts  _ him. He’s everywhere Gideon goes and he’s there when Gideon thinks he’s all alone and he grabs Gideon by the front of his shirt and asks him why he let him die, and Gideon can’t  _ sleep  _ anymore. 

He wishes he could be brave like the new girl Prentiss who corners Spencer at every opportunity and demands answers but he isn’t. He’s too weary now. He’s no good, all worn out, and there’s nothing he can do for Spencer anymore. All he’s ever done to him is put him in harm’s way.

_ There are some lessons we hope they never learn.  _

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I hope the timeline wasn't too confusing! Starts with the end of Sex, Birth, Death in Season 2 and takes us all the way through to S3 E01, which I think is named "Doubt". Of course, Debby Barnes is not an actual victim in the show.


End file.
